The Freelance Reploids have been randomly scattered across time. One may have ended up in ancient Egypt while another got sent to Woodstock. No 2 mercs were sent to the exact same time, but they may have arrived at almost the same time. (Same place 30 seconds apart, as apposed to 200 years apart.)

Their in-game objective is to find the other mercs and/or just get back home to the "present" (21XX). The most common way to accomplish this would be for the mercs to find the Pendant of Pentane in whatever time they happened to arrive and and use it to time jump again. Since they don't know how to use it I'm sure it will require at least a few tries before they get it right. (Despite the humans-only magic rule, Reploids are in fact able to use the Pendant of Pentane for a reason that I will explain in my next RP post.)

There are, however, other ways that the mercs could try to get back to the "present". They could try building their own time machine. Or by finding some kind of wizard. Reploids could seal themselves in a cave and deactivate themselves time capsule style. But the Pendant of Pentane is the only sure way of time jumping that they would know about, but they would have to find it wherever in the world it might be.

The RW mission requirement for you players is this: I want to see everyone bring their character to at least 3 different time periods. You could accomplish this in as little as 1 post, or you could spend a couple months posting your character having adventures in just a single cool time period before moving on to another one.

As I said before we started this mission, 2 Letters of Commendation will be given out when its all over. I will award these based upon your writing; not just technical skill but also imagination. And you have a lot of freedom to be imaginative. You have the opportunity to insert your character into any time! Any place! This has the potential to be a lot of fun.

But time travel can be tricky. Movies screw it up all the time because there's just so much to take into account. In real life a time traveler could easily alter history by doing something extremely minor (i.e. the "butterfly effect" metaphor).

I thought about addressing this by declaring that every time jump would be a time jump back to the original timeline, thus negating any potential paradoxes. BUT, since FR has always been very loose (we've retconned things several times) and only a pseudo-science fiction game I decided it would be much easier to just declare that No one is allowed to do anything that would alter time in a major way that we can't ignored.

That means your character can fight in the Battle of Gettyburg, but you're not allowed to write your character WINNING the Battle of Gettysburg. And while even something as minor as fighting in a battle without changing the outcome, or interacting with people in any way whatsoever, could conceivably change the course of history, we will assume that it does not.

So, in other words, don't do anything that would rewrite history books. If it isn't significant enough to be mentioned in history books then it is fair game and you can go hog wild. (The one loophole is if you create a reason for the historic record to be wrong.)

By the way, everything that happened on the island was purely a framing device for this portion of the mission. I needed to not only send the mercs back in time, but also to get them without their armor or weapons since that would make time travel too easy for them (not to mention screw up history).

I originally conceived of this mission a couple years ago when Maq wanted to retire her character. I didn't have the heart to kill her off so I thought "if she gets lost or chooses to be left behind while time traveling then she'd be out of the game without having died, and could even be brought back later." Even though now Maq doesn't want to nix her character anymore and I think everyone is enjoying her being included, I thought the time travel mission has such great potential that we should still go ahead with it.

Actually they don't necessarily have to be CDs. As I said, characters could potentially show up at nearly the same time only a few minutes apart. And even if they don't a character could spend weeks, ... more

It's nice to have Cylecks and Maq and Lock and Shade and Shadow Star poking their heads in, but hows about somebody posting in the SG already? I just noticed that the last FIVE posts in the mission... more

Hmm... Considering you told us we should wait on you, you taking the last 5 posts of the mission isn't exactly surprising. For the note, in the month of may (which ends in a couple of hours, so feel... more